Processing RAW images are described as developing a negative. What I remember from working in a one-hour photo lab is sitting at the film scanner previewing color 35mm negatives, making adjustments for brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, cropping, dust and red-eye removal. When you had well exposed film, you had much room to play with; to choose a pleasing gamut. But, when making adjustments to poorly exposed film, you still could extract a decent picture; there's more in the negative than meets the eye, or print. It was only when dealing with extremely over/under exposed film that you couldn't extract something desirable; You know you'll have to eat these prints, because you must print them to show the customer you tried your best and give them the option not to pay for those prints.

Now that I've set my camera for RAW+JPG, this is the type of Post Processing I have to look forward to. And I assume it will be very similar to the photo lab experience. Of course, I've got to go out on a planned shoot...in Minnesota...where it's Spring finally today...and everything's still friggin' white! Well, there's always the Cathedral.

Another thing I read is that the same settings that are applied to JPG are available to the RAW file by default. So, you've got the photographer's skills applied for the ambient light conditions, but can disregard them, if you wish.

When you open the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw or equivalent you will have plenty to play with. Your WB will default to your in camera setting but you'll have presets for your in camera settings, but sharpness, saturation, etc which can be user defined in JPG format in camera will not be immediately visible. You can process quickly using the camera settings (Vivid, Standard, Natural etc for Nikon) or process individually as you please. You may be pleasantly surprised

Your suggestion that shooting RAW is somehow lazy is, at best, laughable. It is like saying that people who shoot regular film and develop it themselves are lazy compared to people who shoot with a Polaroid instant camera because they decide later how they will develop the film instead of getting it right at the moment of shooting.

Shooting in RAW requires exactly the same decisions that shooting in jpeg does. Plus you then have to go home and develop the RAW file, making creative decisions that the jpeg shooter leave up to the Canon/Nikon engineers.

PalaDolphin wrote:

Another thing I read is that the same settings that are applied to JPG are available to the RAW file by default.

This is only true if you use the RAW development software supplied by the camera manufacturer. 3rd party software such as Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop can't read the default settings from the camera as this info is proprietary and the camera makers don't release it.

_________________Dan Marchant
I am learning photo graphee - see the results at www.danmarchant.com

Another thing I read is that the same settings that are applied to JPG are available to the RAW file by default.

usernametaken wrote:

This is only true if you use the RAW development software supplied by the camera manufacturer. 3rd party software such as Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop can't read the default settings from the camera as this info is proprietary and the camera makers don't release it.

I'm new to Lightroom, but it seems to have access to this so called proprietary information; I mean it's simply Exif metadata. For example, white balance displays, "As Shot", by default in Lightroom. I tested this with photos taken with extremely intentionally incorrect white balance in RAW+JPG and Lightroom displays it, "As Shot", incorrectly as predicted. I can then set the correct white balance and the picture looks fine.

So, what proprietary information are you referring to that Lightroom can't read?

This is another never ending topic with many views, most comments I've seen regarding raw is you can change the white balance. Most of my shooting is outdoor in bright sunny days, I did a test changing WB for jpegs and the auto WB came out on tops when viewing on a monitor.

Yesterday I shot a beach scene shooting raw/jpeg, using Nikons View NX2 I changed the WB which did not match the auto setting for what I think was natural. For me Nikon are spot on for the D7000 auto WB.

I did find it interesting and more useful to me is the exposure compensation is there and if I get it wrong in camera no problem. Due to bright sun most days I shoot -0.07 EV as default, to slightly improve my shot I altered the EV in raw by 0.01 so not really a big deal.

I can fix everything else in elements, I've concluded I won’t shoot raw unless the shot is important to me and I will have a better chance to fix up bad settings. My thoughts here apply to bright sun only.